Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the rest of America's taxpayers, new study finds

[Jimmy Higgins]

Gas taxes don't come anywhere near close to paying for roads.

They aren't meant to.

They're intended to pay for maintenence of the roads...

Okay, they don't cover that either.

 

[Bomb#20]

I understood your analogy. I just recognize it as crap. Loren didn't drive his car. Your capital gains helped you keep up with inflation. The gains weren't fictional. Those were real dollars that you have in your pocket that you otherwise wouldn't.

Inflation is just another form of tax. The government "deserves" to benefit from inflation for the same reason it deserves to benefit from any other tax. Because the tax will be used to provide services to the people. And yes, sometimes assets are exposed to more than one single tax. This isn't a novel concept.

I.e., it's truthful to measure the starting point in different units from the ending point because doing so broadens the set of assets exposed to the asset tax and you like asset taxes. Looks like an "Appeal to consequences" fallacy.

What the hell are "fictional wages"?

It was a hypothetical. But yes, some people are taxed on fictional wages they didn't receive. In the U.S. it happens to restaurant employees -- if the IRS thinks total reported tips are too low then it makes the individual workers pay taxes on the tips it suspects the workers collectively received and didn't report.

Your analogy is crap.

inflation is reality. It's here. It's not going away. Get used to it. An apple you buy today is not going to be worth the same in a year. It will decay or cost you energy to preserve. Entropy is coming for us all. You want your money to have the same value as time progresses. Tough. Inflation is part of reality and it can and does affect wages too.

And since it affects wages we crank the boundaries between the tax brackets up every year. We don't make believe that minimum wage workers are middle-class because $16.50/hour is a pretty decent wage in 1985 dollars.

 

[Bomb#20]

Will this become a debate about what "society" should or should not mean? Wiktionary offers six definitions of this English word including

A number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act toward a common goal.​

This definition may be compatible with bilby's, but this view is not universally held. For example, on 14 July 1789 a group of French citizens informed their government that they had not given consent and that any goal was not held in common. And right here in this thread we see Infidels who seem to agree that "society" should be managed to favor the interests of the wealthiest land-owners, rather than any mutual consent to serve any common goal.

Storming of the Bastille followed the publication of Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique by Jean-Jacques Rousseau but, as we see in this thread, the Enlightdarkened view has not yet taken full hold in America.

FIFY. The Enlightenment was the Age of Reason. The Reign of Terror, thirty thousand murders, and a death sentence for the guy who wrote The Age of Reason followed the storming of the Bastille. (Which, incidentally, was no longer even being used for political prisoners. The mob set free five actual criminals and two suspected criminals locked up at their families' request.) Here's what an actual Enlightenment philosopher had to say about that publication:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid.​

I herewith ask that a translation of Du contrat social be incorporated into the record by reference. Hence I can confine my further remarks to information gleaned from the Wiktionary page.

The etymology is interesting:

PIE /*sekʷ/ (“to follow”) > /*sokʷ-yo/ (“companion”) > Latin socius (“associated, allied; partner, companion, ally”) > societās, societātem > Old French societé​

Now that you have so ably elucidated the meaning of "society", how about you look into the meaning of "contract"? When Rousseau cribbed his theory from the absolute monarchist Hobbes, he seems to have thought swapping out Hobbes' bad sovereign for his own good sovereign would be enough to fix the concept. But he preserved the rot at the heart. Origin myths are exactly as much a basis for a system of government as strange women lying in ponds distributing swords; and Rousseau's/Hobbes' consent-by-proxy makes exactly as much sense as Christianity's sin-by-proxy and atone-by-proxy.

Certainly the word's source ("ally", "companion") is incompatible with apparent present-day American "conservative" belief that regression to a "society" featuring landowners and serfs should be the goal.

I take it you think what made serfs serfs wasn't the whole working without pay and not being allowed to quit thing, but rather the landowners not giving them free stuff. After you look up "contract" maybe you should look up "serf".